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tonal Pinyin on a Mac: a new option

Mac users — especially those familiar with the old, non-Unicode TimesPinyin font — may want to look into Zev Handel’s TimesPinyin Keyboard Layout, which is designed to make typing Pinyin with tone marks easy.

6 thoughts on “tonal Pinyin on a Mac: a new option”

I was very excited when I saw the title of this article, but I don’t see how this is different from just going into System Preferences > International > Input Menu and just enabling the “U.S. Extended” keyboard layout which lets you type the four tones with Option-A (first tone), Option-E (second tone), Option-V (third tone) and Option-` (fourth tone).

What I was hoping for was a solution somewhat akin to typing Guóy? Luóm?zì in which I wouldn’t have to use combination keys or numbers to get tone marks but that they would just appear when I typed some key combinations (like some Vietnamese input methods).

I’d look forward to using an input method in which say, “guo” was “gu?”, “guoe” was “guó”, “guoo” was “gu?” and “guoh” was “guò”. That would really make my day and make typing toned Pinyin a lot easier. Of course, I haven’t thought this above example out for the entire Pinyin, but it could be done.

i put together the input system like you discribe, because input tonal pinyin with number is not optimal to speed.
Typing pinyin without tone mark save the finger from having to tap awkward numeral key. This simple chinese pinyin input method took its cue from vietnamese telex input method which devoid of numeral key.

i mad sed files to convert between pinyin to unicode and using keyman (free for personal). so if you don’t have keyman still can use sed file to convert.

For Vietnamese I use Unikey which has a couple of keyboard options and I learned the telex system (because it’s what most Vietnamese speakers use). It does take a little getting used (tieengs vieetj for ti?ng vi?t?) to but after a little practice it’s possible to type Vietnamese almost as fast as English.